Bildad

by Esther Greenleaf Mürer From Guinea Pig Zero #3

Terrors frighten them at every side, and chase them at their heels. Disaster is hungry for them, and calamity is ready for their stumbling. By disease their skin is consumed, Death, the Firstborn, consumes their limbs. — Job 18:11-13

A dauntful cavy was Bildad the Shoe-Height. If we took him out of his cage he would wheep and quiver and jerk, literally scared shitless; if we set him on the floor he'd seek refuge under the most immediate furniture and cower there. Bildad had few adventures in his short life. One day he went to school and cringed at the children. One month while we were away he summered in the wilds of Northeast Philly, where he ate watermelon and cowered under a lawn chair on real grass. And the Lord smote Bildad with boils, and an abscess on his neck came open spewing blood and pus. He screamed and shat with terror at the vet's. The vet said the infection would go to his brain. And then a strange thing happened: Bildad the Shoe-Height forgot to be afraid. He became an intrepid explorer. Each day as his walk grew crazier he doggedly lurched and sidled and swam, penetrating ever deeper into the house, yea unto the farthest reaches of the back bedroom. Then one morning he lay chill and trusting on my lap; we said a long good-bye. Half an hour later he was dead, gone to that land where none have need ever to cower again. We shrouded him in a plastic bag, and entombed him in the freezer. Our daughter viewed him daily for a month, after which Daddy took him to his lab in a tote-bag hearse, with straphanger cortege, and Bildad the Shoe-Height's mortal remains joined those of all the other guinea pigs and plunged skyward in a shaft of transmogrifying fire. — 1996